The OEM’s machines are compliant with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations for printing.
TechTarget reported on the devices offering HIPAA compliance “for healthcare”, as because much of healthcare “has gone digital” in the USA, but some hospitals and providers “still use paper records”. Brother “knows that print is not dead”, and has “changed with the times” to offer new MFPs that “deliver HIPAA compliance”, with one case study given in Massachusetts.
Night Nurse, based in Framingham, is an “overnight nurse staffing company” which “finds the new Brother printers indispensable” in its offics, which utilise dispatch consoles for controlling a “nationwide network of nurses who work on demand in 35 states”. The company also works with 500 practices and hospitals, and COO Stuart Pologe noted that it has used Brother machines “since 2004, and still uses them as backups”.
However, it now relies on the MFC-L6800DW series that can produce prints at faster speeds with “higher output and more electronic data era capabilities, Pologe adding that “what they allow us to do is make that transition from a paper-based operation to the emerging non-paper-based operation.
“These machines not only can take in a fax and print it out, but they can also export the fax image over the network to a server to record the fax images and put them in folders for us and give us a backup digital image of the faxes”. In terms of communication, Night Nurse receives calls from hospital or doctor’s answering services, and uses software to route calls to appropriate nurses, who are given patient information to produce a report on their condition and care.
This report is electronically sent through the Night Nurse system to that patient’s care provider, with all spoken communication printed and stored by the Brother devices, secured through having had USB ports removed “prior to use” and only being accessible by “authorised dispatchers”, strong password protection and “managed switches”. Without hard drives that can be “stolen or lost”, the devices are also protected by encryption to pass the HIPAA security audit.
Pologe added that the machines offer help with privacy, security and also in terms of being “critical to maintaining redundancy in the case that a fax machine, computer or network switch fails”, as “we have to have 100 percent reliability. We cannot lose patient information. If we have some catastrophic system failure, we always have a physical piece of paper”.
Jeff Sandler, Brother’s Director of Solutions Marketing, commented: “Night Nurse is a great example of a company that’s taking advantage of our technology. We pack a lot of features into our devices to make them very functional. Our devices enable all those different activities.”